Posted inReality Science

Thanks to Appreciative Reader for defending the scientific worldview

There are three thousand word comments that deserve trashing. Then there are comments of the same length that deserve fervent applause from those of us who respect reality, truth, evidence, reason, and the scientific worldview. That's why I'm sharing another lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" below.  As you'll see if you read the following comment published on my Why neither unicorns nor God are to be believed in post, Appreciative Reader absolutely demolishes the religious perspective of another commenter, Spence Tepper. If this were a boxing fight, it'd be called after the second or third round because too much damage…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Reality Religions

Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Well, the responses I got to my previous post, "Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community," were underwhelming.  Not really surprising, since I said: The question I'd pose to those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive view of reality is this: what alternative to Rauch's approach below do you suggest for determining the nature of objective reality? Meaning, it is easy to criticize reason, rationality, facts, science, open discussion, criticism of propositions about reality, and such. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better approach than the Constitution of Knowledge. Read what follows.…
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Posted inBooks Reality

Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community

I figured that I needed to share another excerpt from Jonathan Rauch's book, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," that comes just before the passages I included in a previous post about this intriguing book. Those Rules for Reality in the previous post have to be implemented by someone. That someone is the reality-based community. In another post I'll share what Rausch considers that community to be.  Basically its people who are willing to act in accord with the Constitution of Knowledge, in much the same way patriotic Americans are willing to abide by the United States Constitution. Of…
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Posted inReality

Rules for Reality — which religious believers ignore

I'm a proud member of the reality-based community. This is a big reason why I no longer believe in God or supernatural phenomena.  It'd be nice if these things actually existed. But "nice" is irrelevant when it comes to learning the truth about reality. Reality is what it is, not what individuals want it to be. When I learned about Jonathan Rauch's book, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," the title alone made me want to buy it. I've only read two of the eight chapters, but I skipped ahead and read the passages that I've shared below.…
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Posted inReality Universe

Mystery of existence is a chill up the spine, not a concept

For many years I've gotten a thrill out of the mystery of existence.  This has nothing to do with what exists. It's all about the brute fact that something exists. Now, that something might well be infinite. For sure it's huge -- countless billions of light years huge. And it's old -- at least 13.8 billion years old and possibly infinitely old. All that is irrelevant when talking about the mystery of existence.  What blows my mind with marvelous regularity is the chill-up-the-spine realization that all this, no matter what it consists of -- is equally present at the tips…
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Posted inComments Reality Spiritual practice/meditation

Is a mechanism required for realizing Oneness?

Below I've shared a lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" that deserved to be made into a blog post. Why? Because the comment is nicely thought out and well written. It addresses an interesting question: whether someone's experience of Oneness just happened, and can't be described in a step-by-step fashion, or whether a mechanism that leads to an experience like this can be communicated to others. I tend to agree with Appreciative Reader that in general, someone's spiritual realization is capable of being analyzed and critiqued to a significant degree. As I've noted before, dreams are highly personal and unlike everyday…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

Be born again through science

Frank Wilczek, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004, has written a compelling book about the universe: Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality. Here's a passage from his Afterword chapter that I like a lot. It is indeed strange that we make such a division between internal and external worlds, when in truth there is only one thing going on. The child of our introduction, now an adult, may come to understand the fundamental conclusions that science, following its radically conservative method, reaches about the physical world.  Then she is prepared to revisit the starting point of her adventure…
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Posted inReality

Radical embrace of reality

I like the sound of it: radical embrace of reality.  I'm not entirely sure what those words mean to me. They just popped into my head recently, and I've given them a home in my cranium until they decide to pop out and head somewhere else. As long as this notion is rumbling around in my mind, I figure I might as well try to describe why I find it so appealing.  Reality is a close relative of truth. I admire both -- reality and truth. When I used to give talks to fellow devotees of the Eastern form of…
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Posted inBooks Reality

Wear your identity lightly if you value truth

This morning I finished reading Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, the subject of three previous posts (here, here, and here). Her final chapters were great. Two had to do with how we sometimes hold on to beliefs so tightly, they become part of our identity. This is especially true of religious and political beliefs. Here's an excerpt  from the "How Beliefs Become Identities" chapter. The problem with our tendency to turn beliefs into identities isn't that it pits us against each other. At least, that's not the problem I'm concerned with here.…
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Posted inBooks Radha Soami Satsang Beas Reality

Update your beliefs often as new information comes in

Every morning I read another chapter of Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, the subject of two previous posts (here and here). I really liked her "How to Be Wrong" chapter. Along with most people, I don't enjoy finding out I was wrong about something. But it's a heck of a lot better than continuing on in my wrongness, which keeps me from learning a more complete truth about that thing. Below you can read excerpts from that chapter. They're in three sections, dealing with changing your mind frequently, the ease of…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Reality Religions

You have options. In religions. In everything else.

I'm continuing to enjoy my reading of Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, the subject of my previous post.  Her core idea is that motivated reasoning, where we ignore what's true because our motivation is to preserve our current belief structure, leads to a soldier mindset aimed at defending our beliefs from that unwelcome intruder, reality.  By contrast, a scout mindset values truth-seeking through accuracy motivated reasoning. Our goal is know what is really there, not what we hope is there, what we'd like to be there, or what others want us…
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Posted inReality

Embrace the Scout mindset, not the Soldier mindset

My new favorite book -- the latest in a countless (almost) series of favorites -- is Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. Galef's key concept is the distinction between a Solider and Scout mindset. This chart shows basic differences between them. In an initial chapter, Galef talks about motivated reasoning, the basis for a Soldier mindset. The tricky thing about motivated reasoning is that even though it's easy to spot in other people, it doesn't feel like motivated reasoning from the inside. When we reason, it feels like we're being objective. Fair-minded.…
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Posted inReality

Have faith in the mystery of what we don’t know

Today Spence Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog who, pleasingly, uses his real name when commenting, left a marvelous comment on a recent post of mine.  You can read it below.  What Tepper said reminds me a lot of what Alan Watts wrote about faith in one of my favorite books, The Wisdom of Insecurity.  Here's part of the Watts quotation from that book that I included in a 2008 post, "Real and false faith." We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind…
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Posted inMystics Reality

Truth is all-important, in mysticism and everywhere else

Sometimes a comment is left on one of my blog posts that leaves me with a WTF (what the fuck) feeling. Meaning, I can't begin to understand where the commenter is coming from. Here's a recent example that starts off with a quote from a post of mine. >>If mystics claim to find a new reality, they need to prove it<< WHY? WHY do they need to prove it? No mystic owes anything to anybody. Wow. The answer to that all caps Why is one-word obvious. Truth. Truth is why a mystic needs to back up their claim of finding…
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Posted inMystics Reality

If mystics claim to find a new reality, they need to prove it

I've been enjoying the recent comment conversations between some of the Church of the Churchless regulars. Meaning, frequent visitors to this blog. Having featured a comment from "Appreciative Reader" in a blog post a few days ago, I generally find myself agreeing with this person's perspective. Which I'm not going to attempt to summarize, since that perspective is nuanced. Instead, here's my take on a theme that features in the above-mentioned comment conversations: how someone can tell the difference between genuine and spurious mystical experiences. My first assumption -- which seems inarguable to me -- is that while mystics and…
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Posted inReality Science

Why quantum is relative, as Buddhism surmises

For many years I've had a strong interest in quantum physics -- from the perspective of someone who knows next to nothing about its mathematics, but is fascinated by the philosophical side of it. There's a "shut up and calculate" position that most quantum physicists embrace.  The theory works. Spectacularly. If it didn't, our technological modern world would be much different. So lots of scientists don't worry about the philosophical foundation of quantum physics. They're just interested in applying the mathematical underpinning to practical problems and applications.  Then there are physicists like Carlo Rovelli. He wrote a fascinating piece in…
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Posted inReality Religions

Religions are sort of like conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories always have been around. But they've proliferated, in the United States, at least, in recent years. Donald Trump deserves much of the credit, better termed blame.  Trump never saw a fact that he didn't like to denigrate, calling every media story which irritated him "fake news."  Of course, almost always there wasn't anything fake about the news. However, Trump's devotees came to feel like they were in a special club of People in the Know. Meaning, people who think they know what is really going on in the world. Which is much different from actually knowing. At the…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Reality

Buddhism can free us from evolution’s delusion

It happened again this morning, a sign from the non-God.  I'd tried to continue reading a couple of Buddhist books that appealed to me, aside from occasional mentions of supposed supernatural phenomena, which had been bothering me. Today the bothering overcame my liking of the books.  In the course of returning them to the Buddhism section of my bookcase, my eye hit upon a book by Robert Wright, "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment." Highlighting indicated that I'd read the entire book. But so far as I can tell, I never wrote a blog…
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Posted inReality Universe

Grappling with the fact that existence has always existed

Recently I got this email from a fellow marveler at the inescapable fact that existence must always have existed in some form, or the universe we are a part of couldn't have come to be.  Hello Brian, I recently read this article of yours and was amazed how precisely it described the issue that's been on my mind for a long time. It seems inescapable to posit that something has always existed, something that never had a beginning. And as you point out in the article, trying to conceive and imagine that seems impossible: "the very possibility of cognizing an answer vanishes". And I…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality

My podcast interview with Marie D’Elephant was enjoyable

Yesterday I spent 1 hour and 48 minutes talking with Marie D'Elephant for a podcast that's scheduled to be released on February 4 via her Everyone's Autonomous Podcast site.  Here's the description of what D'Elephant is up to. During the Everyone's Agnostic podcast from 2015-2019, we shared our stories of religious trauma and the pain of deconversion.  When that podcast went on a hiatus, a beautiful child was born: Everyone's Autonomous by Marie D'Elephant. She picks up the discussion by talking with guests and subject matter experts about how we can begin to move forward after having processed our toxic…
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